Dealing with Hard Feelings
I bet sometimes you find yourself feeling absolutely shitty. Perhaps you woke up with it. Or maybe it just comes. Almost instantly we mentally scramble to find a way out. We squirm like wiggly worms running away from the rain flood, desperately seeking the surface where we can breathe again. Turn on some music, what’s in the fridge, give me the remote, I need to hit the gym. Maybe just blog about it. Anything but feel the feelings. We could deny that we feel them. Maybe try to rationalize them away. Or how about quoting some Bible scripture, that should work. God deliver me from this anguish.
While we writhe and sweat inside our minds trying to avoid the terrible unpleasant waves of feeling, there doesn’t seem to be a clear exit. And it is so inconvenient right now. How rude. Damn these feelings. Who wants emotions anyways? Maybe I just need to retreat back into the safety of my mental space. These feelings don’t make sense so let’s just attack them. Shoot them down. Put up mental barriers to keep the feelings from invading your sanity again and again, and again.
It sucks.
But what if we just stop when the swells come. Become reflective on why the feelings are there. Try to find a root. Wait I take that back. First stop and feel. Cry if we must. Grieve. Shout. Feel. Then try to decode.
Stop running your mantra of self-affirmations when they come trying to feel better. Stop trying to blow the dark fog of bad feelings away. Let the dirty cloud pass through you. Save your breath and try to still yourself. Don’t panic. Become more comfortable with the uncomfortable. Is it so bad? Perhaps fighting emotions intensifies the psychosomatic distress. Can you reject just the unpleasant feelings and only accept the euphoric ones? If we let ourselves feel the shitty ass feelings, they do seem to lessen. Still sucks. But not as bad. And maybe they do just pass through us and reveal some sun again.
Will they return? Yea probably, maybe. Maybe the issues are still there bringing them back. But you can’t avoid them. Pressing them into some dark corner of our internal ecosystem only makes them come out sideways eventually, and usually in destructive ways. Could be addictions, rage, passive-aggressiveness, coldness, depression, resentment, numbness, black and white thinking. You see where this leads?
You see our mind stores emotions in our body as we subconsciously react to our environment. These emotions are there somewhere. They may or may not manifest into feelings but they are there doing something. The best we can do sometimes is to allow ourselves to reactively just feel and thus strengthen the pipeline between emotions and feelings.
Maybe the particular feelings you feel do not make sense. Maybe there doesn’t seem to be a reason. Sometimes it is ok to distract, for a time. Sometimes, no. Maybe you need to talk to someone, other times to be alone. In some people, feelings have chronic underlying issues that need treatment. Sometimes you need to do more than just feel them. Is all of this confusing? No wonder why some reject emotions altogether. Who wants to deal with this crap?
But feelings do make sense. They bring in power and life where mental reasoning alone cannot. They are not easy. Feelings are sometimes ruthless like a storm and not really a science. You cannot put it into a formula: feeling(XYZ) = action(ABC). There is no feeling and emotion handbook to know what to do every time. They are an artwork. An art to perfected over a lifetime. Having a guide, someone who has walked similar paths, can help. Feelings are what add the color to your life and others. Do not reject them. Challenge yourself to embrace them and live life in color!
